Gods Teardrops reminds me of something to do with Wormwood. Not the bitter taste. Nor the incredible adjustment of perception that is possible with a decent Absinthe.
"Bad Day On The Midway reminds me of
Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec.
"Bad Day On The Midway was a departure for computer game experience. In retrospect,
"Bad Day On The Midway was an awful game. The visual presence was sort of better than but worse than other games. The soundtrack was superior to contemporary games such as
Streets Of Rage 2 and
Tetris. The same ethical dimension found in, for example,
God In 3 Persons runs through
Bad Day On The Midway.
Causing deaths and saving lives in a first person puzzle game. This is not the high point of game culture.
The British Board Of Film Censors passed
"Bad Day On The Midway as a certificate 12 (AZG129210) uncut on 29 March 1996. Any copies purchased before that date in the UK would be illegal. Technically a video nasty. Nobody, of course, would ever consider purchasing an uncensored copy. Nobody. Particularly, nobody would consider purchasing a copy in Tower Records - Dawson Street (Sráid Dhásain) - in Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath) and transporting it across The Sea to Liverpool. That would be wrong. Possibly illegal as it would be importing an "uncertified work" which would never please the Censor. They did pass it uncut for 12 year olds, though. I suspect a lack of deep appreciation of the general genre of computer games on the part of the Censor.
It was never a great game. The ability for macromedia to deliver the kind of content that gamers desire was never really there. The platform that
Bad Day On The Midway was developed on was just too primitive. The overarching puzzle - of how to prevent a death - was far too radical for gaming where genocide was the the route to the high score. Like much computer entertainment from the past, it has aged badly. As different reviews over time demonstrate. True there is a huge amount to play with, but it is as a toy not a game.
"If there's a star here, it's the graphic design: a rich swamp-rot mindscape overseen by Freak Show's Jim Ludtke with contributions (in the tales within Bad Day) from such underground-comix stalwarts as Richard Sala, Paul Mavrides, and Peter Kuper. Kuper's take on Otto the rat keeper's grim backstory is particularly breathtaking: As the funky, stencilled images unfurl across your monitor to the unsettling strains of the Residents' music, it's clear that a whole new way of telling stories is being born."
Entertainment Weekly (November 24th 1995)
Bad Day is a product of the fertile imaginations of The Residents, the anonymous performance artists whose first twisted CD-ROM offering, Freak Show, demonstrated an enticing potential for the medium. With Bad Day, they've come even closer to what may be the next genre of entertainment: interactive graphic novels. With graphics that perfectly match the story's mood, hauntingly upbeat music, and superbly crafted characters, the twisted design team has forged a story that is engrossing and entertaining throughout.
GameSpot (May 01, 1996)
In conclusion, Bad Day on the Midway is a game that you either love or hate. Frustrating, weird, and disorienting, it is lesser of an adventure game than an interactive story.
Adventure Classic Gaming (Jun 06, 2010)
Which highlights the problem for the Residents: Critics always think they know better than Artists. Critics who can pull magnificent references, out of a nether orifice, to the Frankfurt School or Deconstruction or Umberto Eco's Open Reading may not be the best authorities on the question, "is this a good game?". In pursuit of a good game there is generally a balance between graphics, sound and gameplay. The mechanics of gameplay are notoriously difficult to make entertaining. Greg Easter designed a Mark Of The Mole Game for the Atari VCS/2600. This game was never completely finished. However there is a description of the gameplay which has features in common with the Lucasarts "Loom" (1990). Both "Loom" and "Mark Of The Mole" foreshadow the Virtual Reality approach of using multiple modes of input. An idea that reappears in
Bad Day On The Midway.
The game is time limited. Which essentially restricts how you can attempt to hear the music. True, there is are other ways to hear the music, but, conceptually the Residents were making the music part of the game. Unlike the bleeps and boings of contemporary computer games or music as background, this was a definite foregrounding of music as part of the work. Much the same as anybody being able to use autotune but only one or two people using multiple tracking to build up chords and sound texture from autotuned voices,
Bad Day On The Midway is not simply doing what is being done before.
Between Tower Records in Dublin there is a sea filled with Islands. Ynys Môn (Anglesey), Ellan Vannin (Isle of Mann), Holy Island (Ynys Gybi), Walney Island, Lambay Island (Sheep Island), North Bull Island, Ramsey Island, Bardsey Island, Calf of Man, Barrow Island, Roa Island, Ynys Gaint, Piel Island, Hilbre Island, Ynys Castell, Ynys Gored Goch, Chicken Rock, Middle Mouse, East Mouse, Puffin Island and on and on. Luckily, there has been regular shipping between the big island and the little Island since about the fifth century. The shipping lines are used to avoiding them - even when they are Saint Tudwal's Islands but get called the Studwells; or Dalkey Island which may simply be a figment of the pen of Brian Nolan nee Flann Obrien. Which is achieved by taking the Middle Way between England and Ireland or Wales and Ireland. The Middle Way is not to be confused with the Midway or, indeed, the Middle Passage.
The Middle Passage was the euphemism for the slave trade: the part of the trade where people were shipped from Africa to the New World in exchange for finished goods from Liverpool to Africa. Which is not to say that there was no slave shipping from Liverpool - or Bristol, for that matter. Simply that the Middle Way is not the Middle Passage. This is what you get when you are Timmy: a presence in a world that is ethically and morally more complex than you can even aspire to be. It is a world that is largely hidden and access is controlled: such is the nature of Obscurity and Computer Games. Rules everywhere.
To get from Tower Records on Dawson Street you have to avoid Kildare Street (Sráid Chill Dara). If you fail to do that then you can end up in the National Museum and that will distract you into visiting the Natural History Museum on Merrion Street (Sráid Mhuirfean). Which will have you running out of time for catching the Ferry at eight this evening. Which, even though it is four o'clock, is closer than you think. Even if you get distracted by the
Derrynaflan Hoard you should be shifting along. It is pointless to hang about. Indeed, until you sight The Poolbeg Chimneys you are really not in a position to relax.
Before the Good Friday Agreement in 1999, travelling from Ireland to England was always a bit more fraught with tension. Because of
"The Situation" it was common to be searched. In the 1970s it was common to have records and books confiscated on the way into Ireland - and equally on the way out. The Censors were particulary upset by things such as newspapers with
**** women and most David Bowie Records such as
Aladdin Sane was banned because it promoted something or other. The latter might well have been that the Customs Officers were collectors rather than Censors. You never know. Travelling with forbidden goods, such as an uncertified computer games, was always an invitation to detention. Which was more of an inconvenience than you might think.
So it was that, turning up at the Customs with a copy of
"Bad Day On The Midway was a little more fraught than returning from the shop and attempting to get things to work on a computer that might or might not have the right CD-ROM Player. It was no help that I was also transporting a copy of
"Haveth Childers Everywhere. (first edition), signed". Which is the danger of going to the Port Of Dublin Via Cathach Books. These are always considerations when you are wandering around the emerging Free Market. The 1990's was a good time, since you could purchase
"Bad Day On The Midway and a James Joyce first edition and skip over the sea with a good deal of ease -without a passport even. The copy of
"Bad Day On The Midway got checked out and, suprisingly, was not on some
Index Librorum Prohibitorum as was the Joyce scribble. Thus managing to return to Liverpool without any upsetting diversion to the big boy's prison and with a substantial profit on the Joyce nonsense.
So that would be the first time I actually trafficked in high art. Which may have been the Joyce or may have been the Residents.
Realising that the game had no save facility was actually the single most annoying thing as I was practicing being a transient - wandering around Europe with software engineering spanners in tow. Gradually, in retrospect, after listening to the
Have a Bad Day soundtrack, it dawned upon me that the useful comparison is with
Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec. Wherein the Theory Of Obscurity gains some kind of intellectual substance.
Perec was a member of the OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). Once you are a member you can never leave - much like
Freak Show. Which, if you consider the nature of sets and membership in mathematics, makes perfect sense. In
Life A User's Manual ( La Vie mode d'emploi), there is a description of the work as "novels" - plural not singular. Which is composed of a set of 100 chapters - one unwritten as it corresponds to the basement - which form a narrative based on "The Knight's Tour" on a ten by ten chessboard. Which has the reader hopping from chapter to chapter as if at random. It is entirely possible to navigate the work in a different order. For example, simply begin at the first chapter and read through to the last. Each chapter is simply a building block that the Reader assembles. Ultimately the identity of the real story of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier is obscured by a linear reading. Highlighting the nature of the Theory of Obscurity as being a route to practice and not vicious abstraction. Which, for Perec, the constraint is a self conscious demand on the Reader. For The Residents, with
"Bad Day On The Midway there is no overt demand for the Listener to do anything: everything arises from what the Player does.
There is an element of metempsychosis in
"Bad Day On The Midway - a recurring theme in James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses (1922). The thematic puzzles of death and moral quandry and the game mechanic of metempsychosis do not make a good game. But it does ensure that the music is navigated in a way that is unique to each Listener. Every Listener of
Bad Day On The Midway had a different listening experience that was, in fact, intended to be different. Which places
Bad Day On The Midway right back in the centre of The Theory Of Phonetic Organisation and the Theory Of Obscurity.
In truth, nobody but the Residents can actually know the internal story of
Bad Day On The Midway, everything else is hypothesis. There is a lot of speculation about the fate of the midway, the man in the coma, a killer, a plague, and even the Taxman - who could be, just as easily,
The Census Taker. The voice acting and the artwork are far superior to the gameplay. Which, perhaps, begins to show the generational gap between the Residents and the post-computer world.
Bad Day On The Midway anticipates the kind of multilayered content that is routinely found in more recent games such as
Skyrim - which has an entire
library of backstory. While
Skyrim relies on the trope of books,
Bad Day On The Midway has people as living books. In the metempsychosis, there is a realisation that all of the characters have an interior world that is obscured from the Viewer. The stream of consciousness from Timmy hints at this interior world, but, in reality there is no great revelation of the interior world of Others.
some are flowers
some are weeds
some are sewers
and some are seeds
some are sailors without a sea
and some are sorry
just like me
Which makes the twelve tracks of
Have A Bad Day a mere hint of the depth of texture in
Bad Day On The Midway. There are 479,001,600 permutations of the twelve tracks. Which highlights the randomiser, inherent in the program presentation of the material. The exact way the goals change varies from play to play leaving the Player with a on in a half billion chance of playing the same game as another person - even if that person is simply yourself two days later. The lack of a save facility makes that randomisation of the experience always subject to memory. Which requires that all experience of
Bad Day On The Midway is a recollection. It is a form of therapeutic metempsychosis that leads to anamnesis: remembering what it is that you have forgotten. Which is, according to Socratic tradition, part of whatever it is the knowledge is. The whole experience of
Bad Day On The Midway prefigures the novel
S 99013) by Doug Dorst and is reminiscent of
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
Bad Day On The Midway is almost as if
Freak Show had elements removed, piece by piece and replaced resulting in
Bad Day On The Midway. It could, almost, be as if the Residents were musically exploring
Theseus' Ship Paradox in a way that goes beyond the anagrammatics of twelve tone serialism.
Which leads to the latest incarnation, the Randy Rose Novel:
The Residents' Bad Day On The Midway. As though the exact form of the work has not yet taken place. Much like
A Humument: A treated Victorian novel, by British artist Tom Phillips (1970 et seq.).
A Humument is an art book created over WH Mallock's 1892 novel
A Human Document; Phillips' title resulting from the partial deletion of the 1892 title:
A Human document. The Listeners' experience is being taken further and further away from the source of the experience. Until, at some point we will remember
Dagmar and
Timmy in some new configuration involving a murder, perhaps of
Mickey The Mumbling Midget.
No one knows where it goes
or even if it cares
why people stare
and think about
lost time
when its sickly and not very full
time is a sheep shedding wool
that could have become a sweater
The Dagmar, Timmy, Mickey murder will be an artefact of memory. Our making something that does not exist. Like time's sweater. The sounds of
Bad Day On The Midway are the thing that people claim to remember. Yet, in reality, the majority of the soundscape is never remembered in any great detail. It is not like the endless replaying of
Santa Dog that etches the shifting interpretations of the chorus into memory.
Bad Day On The Midway is much more subtle. It transforms the Listener and the Player into a new kind of Audience: an Audience that, like the river of Heraclitus, is never the same twice.
Much of the genuine innovation of
Bad Day On The Midway comes from the
infrafine presence of people like Steve Cerio who collaborated with with legendary animator Jim Ludtke on the “Dixies Kill-a-Commie shooting gallery" for
Bad Day at the Midway. Which is the reason for awards being won. The fact that the gameplay was poor is not a great criticism: it points to where the real passion, innovation and power is. Layered into the work are people being voices such as Diane Alden, Molly Harvey and even a visual appearance by a Homer Flynn look-a-like. The depth of work is not, for the most part, in the sounds but in the organisation. The manner in which the entirety of
Bad Day On The Midway is actually organised. Despite the almost omniscent viewpoint of the Game Player, you never experience everything.
Which means that the replay value of the game element is at a premium. Yet, the gameplay does not stand up to scrutiny. Subsequent games have done the same sort of puzzle-exploration-mystery-solving better. Few have done it with any of the cultural depth that
Bad Day On The Midway provides. Many games only have gameplay. It is the hook for most games produced as freemium: there is no depth simply a Skinner Box. Which is fundamentally different to
Bad Day On The Midway which manages to be part of the transition from the
Mark Of The Mole kind of game production, where the Mole characters were built up pixel by pixel and constrained by the scarcity of memory and processing power, into the modern, industrialised, studio production methods of Electronic Arts or Bullfrog.
Bad Day On The Midway was constrained by the content management abilities of
Macromedia which was revolutionary but simple in comparison to systems such as
Unity which are facilitating a return to the kind of game and toy production that
Macromedia enabled.
Bad Day On The Midway seems to have fundamentally changed something about the Residents. All of the sounds produced after
Bad Day On The Midway have an added dimension. Revolutionary as the
Mark Of The Mole Game would have been as a "Band Making A Game",
Bad Day On The Midway marks the point at which no band - no matter how traditional or experimental - could ignore the digital world. All of the sounds produced after
Bad Day On The Midway seem to be Internet ready: capable of being a component of a larger work and not simply a thing standing alone. The inevitable synthesis of The Theory Of Phonetic Organisation is for Musical Work to be an element of a
Gesamtkunstwerk. Which is where the gameplay becomes an incidental. A means to an end. Which is yet another metempsychosis.
Between
Bad Day On The Midway and
Freak Show there was a dimension added to whatever it is that the Residents do. Something about storytelling that began to transcend the simple narrative technique of reading out aloud to children. The shift was toward the kind of ethical, moral and philosophical complexity that was beginning to emerge from the nature of a world connecting cultures across the globe.
Eskimo might well have shown how that cultural collision ends badly but the shift with
Bad Day On The Midway was not about that kind of gross level. Something about
Bad Day On The Midway was about narratives becoming an interaction, an experience and not simply the passive acceptance of the weird.
Somewhere in Schipol Airport, I lost my copy of Bad Day On The Midway. Should you find it I would be happy to have it returned. I rely on the Have A Bad Day disc to entertain me - and a nice hardback book. Such is one of the problems of wandering about: you lose more than you keep.